Wednesday, October 26, 2016

New York Times' Emergency Backup Conservative Public Intellectual

Confesses he really doesn't know anything about public intellectuallizin'.

Today was the day it began to dawn on H. Pecksniff Rosencrantz "Ross" Douthat III that he and every other card-carrying member of the professional Conservative Brain Caste really really suck at their job:

The first failure was a failure of governance and wisdom, under George W. Bush and in the years that followed. Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly...

What Mr. Douthat is trying gently suggest is that if Dubya hadn't lied American into the wrong war and hadn't fucked that war up something something New American Century!

What Mr. Douthat is desperately trying not to say is "Holy shit, the Left really was right about us smug little assholes all along!"

Mr. Douthat continues:

...

The second failure was a failure of recognition and self-critique, in which the right’s best minds deceived themselves about (or made excuses for) the toxic tendencies of populism, which were manifest in various hysterias long before Sean Hannity swooned for Donald Trump. What the intellectuals did not see clearly enough was that Fox News and talk radio and the internet had made right-wing populism...

Some conservatives told themselves that Fox and Drudge and Breitbart were just the evolving right-of-center alternative to the liberal mainstream media, when in reality they were more fact-averse and irresponsible. Others (myself included) told ourselves that this irresponsibility could be mitigated by effective statesmanship, when in reality political conservatism’s leaders — including high-minded figures like Paul Ryan — turned out to have no strategy save self-preservation.

...

For the record, it has taken less than the gestation period of the average porcupine for Donald J. Trump (and that vengeful bitch Karma) to force both of the New York Times' highly-paid professional Conservative Public Intellectuals into clenched-teeth admissions that they never had the slightest fucking clue as to what was really going on inside the Conservative movement, the Republican party or America in general (David Brooks, March 2016)

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

The only thing that could make this ideological walk-of-shame more tawdry would be for Mr, Douthat to seek solace by throwing himself into the ideological arms of Bill Kristol's idiot son-in-law.

But what are the odds of...

Wait! I spoke too soon!

“This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual,” writes Matthew Continetti, the editor of The Washington Free Beacon, in a long essay tracing how the highbrow conservatism of Burnham and William F. Buckley sought to work with and through the anti-establishment impulses of the Middle American right. “After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home.”

And, Continetti adds, “what makes this crisis acute is the knowledge that he and his predecessors may have helped to bring it on themselves.”

The only word amiss in this analysis is “may.” The crisis described in Continetti’s essay was not created by the conservative intelligentsia alone. But three signal failures of that intelligentsia clearly contributed to the right’s disastrous rendezvous with Trumpism.

I'm so tired of these douchebags "intellectualizing" whilst still waxing lyrical about "conservatism" as if it was actually ever a Thing. And then the rending of tunics over so-called "populism" as if THAT's what rained on their perfect conserva-world parade.

So-called conservatism has always been about the 1% screwing over the proles good and proper. Since FDR's time, it's sole goal and aim was to dismantle the New Deal and related legislation that inured to the benefit of the rabble.

So-called "conservatives" since Nixon have employed the Southern Strategy - increasingly on steroids - to gin up a reliable racist nasty base of white shitheads to vote against their own interests in the name of: somehow the N*****s, Messicans, Muzlinz, etc, will all be WORSE off than them. So it's all good. Plus also somehow convincing these jerkwads that said minorities and "illegals" are all somehow living in some paradise where they're getting tons of money and services being unfairly denied to white people because the horrible Libruls have enabled this to happen. So HATE on all libruls forever for being traitors to our whiteness.

It's all crazytown all the time. All the maundering about the putative intellectual roots of some purity conservatism is yet more wanking. All of these pundits just circle jerk the live long day. Really tedious.

I seem to remember Continetti writing an entire book in praise of Sarah Palin. I also remember Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 campaign giving a states' rights speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

All of these pundits just circle jerk the live long day. Really tedious.

Seconded. These people, and I use the term loosely, are the sort of writing that Woody Smith had in mind when he wrote, in his notebooks, "Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of -- but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

Taking the Holistic approach in much of which we witness and are forced into being exposed to. In regards to this posts theme of conservative vestiges who humbly exist merely to educate their perceived Godless opposition that knows no better.

Through my kaleidoscope, I smell the color of profit through another bankruptcy.

Decoded, It means we are seeing the fundamental promotions, resumes and displays of loyalty of what is to come next.Oh yes, You have heard it, the media hints of it, the drying solidification of the soft turd in business dealing are adding up.The Trump News Network of Freedom and Greatness.24 hours a day airtime to fill with the entire cast of fascism at your door.

FOX being Ailes-less and discovered to have put their loyalist viewers in enormous lie defending situations. Is so humiliating. They cannot even say "GW Bush" The thrill of Trump trashing Jeb Bush and his Brothers presidency in the primary gave them a sense of dignity they desperately fantasize of their over bearing false pride in the conservative ideology.

Not even the doomed for bankruptcy Trump network can consolidate the purity of,God before Country and Ideology before everything else.There is no cure for this disease. Diluting it's illness as it spread has so far been the most effective treatment.To be sure,the auditions and resumes for this Trump network are being polished in front of us.

"Had there been weapons of mass destruction under Iraqi soil and a successful occupation, or had Bush and his advisers chosen a more prudent post-Sept. 11 course, the trust that right-wing populists placed in their elites might not have frayed so quickly..."

So if the lies they have told were true or they were not the war maddened lunatics with an understand of geo-politics gained from too many games of Risk they would not have been shown themselves war maddened etc. ect.Right - and if wishes were Horses even beggars would ride. Or as a cruder version goes "if a frog had wings it wouldn't bump its ass on the ground.